Does shopping for home insurance hurt your credit score? (mortgage, mortgage, rental)

[KB4]

We are shopping for insurance and insurance companies are asking for SSN. Do you really need to give your SSN to get a quote? And if they run your credit history, would this be a soft hit or a hard hit? I'm concerned because we are buying a house and would prefer to avoid even a small drop in the credit score.

[Nikki Siam]

I shopped around for car insurance and decided to stay with the one I have but credit score dropped 30 points that month. It returned the next two months but very uncomfortable how just inquiring can do that.

[capp16]

I just found a Q&A on Experian.com where the "Ask Experian" team responded to someone asking what impact insurance inquiries will have on their credit report:

"An inquiry will be added to your credit report each time an insurance company accesses your credit report. But, the inquiries will have no effect on credit scores or lending decisions.

Insurance inquiries are shown only on your personal credit report. They are not provided to lenders, so they are not considered in credit score calculations or lending decisions. The inquiries are treated the same way as inquiries for employment purposes, preapproved credit offers, and requests from you for a personal credit report.
Because inquiries for these purposes are the result of your application for credit, they are shown only to you so that you have a complete record of who accessed your credit report and why.
https://www.experian.com/ask-experia...it-scores.html



So Nikki I wonder how that's possible if you saw your credit score drop 30 points. Btw, I'm not doubting you at all! Just curious about how this works.

[AZ Manager]

Insurance inquiries are soft pulls so they don't have any impact on scores, the only stuff that has an impact on scores are hard pulls. Hard pulls are stuff where you are looking for credit like opening accounts, applying for loans, and increasing limits, and some background checks are considered hard pulls, like applying for a rental, and are treated similarly to applying for a mortgage. You do get a shopping window where all hard pulls for a mortgage are treated as a single pull within a time frame, I think it is 45 days but it could be less, to allow you to rate shop without bombing your score. Also note that in some cases even a hard pull wont lower your score, though this doesn't apply to everyone, and even if it does you wont see a 30 point drop like Nikki claims happened, more likely you had a revolving debt report increase that bumped your score down a tad.